Well, this is sure to raise a few eyebrows here and there. Today, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, Mark Shuttleworth held his keynote speech, and in it, he announced that Ubuntu will switch to the Unity user interface come release, for both the netbook as well as the desktop, leaving the GNOME user interface behind (but keeping the GNOME platform).

I think your comment was indeed relevant to the subject matter, however you really should have elaborated, as you did in the post I'm responding to. Otherwise, you appear to be trying to start a flame war (and possibly succeeding).

I've always had a love/hate relationship with GNOME; I was a big fan of 1.x, when many weren't. 2.x sucked at first, then 2.4 made my year. 2.6 went a step backwards for me, and slowly improved again from there. The majority of my experience with GNOME early on was via Slackware, then Debian and Ubuntu after Pat dropped it.

GNOME currently, to me, is like a lump of clay; it's a pile of crap until someone (Canonical, for example) picks it up and shapes it into something useful and beautiful. Someone who never cared for it in the first place (Pat Volkerding) could make it somewhat usable and decent looking, but really didn't put much time and effort into it, so when it became too unwieldy to maintain it had to go.

As for Unity...I don't know. I didn't care for it at all on my netbook, and switched to the default desktop in Ubuntu. It may turn out to be a better fit on big desktops, so there's hope I guess. I haven't used Gnome Shell yet, but from the look of the screenshots and text descriptions, I don't think I'll like it either.

I think in the future I'll stick with XFCE. Canonical's implementation of it is decent, and Slackware's version is pretty much vanilla so it's easy to customize to my liking. Hell, I may even give KDE another go, though not on the netbook; it needs a lot of screen space to really do well in my experience.